Things made by people who live here
Austin’s famous brands mostly are not Austin’s anymore. The ones below still are: founded here, still independent, and run by people who answer their own email. Each entry says who makes the thing, why they started, and who it is actually for. These are researched profiles, not product reviews: we dig into each maker’s own story and record, and we say so when something is a judgment call.
Some of the buy links below are affiliate links: if you purchase through them, we earn a small commission at no cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That never affects who is on this page; several makers here are not on Amazon at all, and they stay anyway.
NUFS
Kristine and Jessica Tran · Gluten-free, dairy-free crackers
Kristine and Jessica Tran started NUFS after their father’s diabetes diagnosis sent them looking for a snack they could put in front of the whole family without a compromise. What they landed on is a cracker. Gluten-free, dairy-free, no seed oils, in three flavors: sea salt, everything, and a hot honey that is drizzled by hand with real honey. That last detail decides who this is for. If you keep a gluten-free house, or you have started turning boxes over to read the oil, this is the cracker to put under cheese when people come by. If you are vegan, the hot honey is out. And it sells in multi-box packs, so treat it as a stock-up rather than a one-box errand.
Oca Foods
Renato Raposo · Brazilian paçoca peanut bites
Renato Raposo left a corporate tech job in 2024 to make paçoca full time, the Brazilian peanut candy he grew up on and could not find here. He made the first batches at home and sold them at Austin farmers markets under a different name before it became Oca. Paçoca is ground roasted peanuts pressed with sugar and salt into a bite that starts crumbly and finishes crunchy. Three ingredients, and that is the entire thing. In 2025 it took the grand prize in H-E-B’s Quest for Texas Best. This one is for people who like peanuts plainly and want a snack that survives a bag. It is not for anyone with a peanut allergy, and not for anyone who wants something soft.
Tozi Superfoods
Rocío, Bertha, and Maria León · Blue corn and amaranth tortillas
Tozi is run by Rocío León with her mother Bertha and her sister Maria, three women in one family making tortillas from recipes Rocío learned standing next to her grandmothers. She was a management consultant before this, on planes, and she rebuilt her working life around the family kitchen instead. The name comes from Toci, an Aztec goddess described as the grandmother of the gods, which tells you where the family’s attention sits. The tortillas are heirloom blue corn blended with amaranth, a grain the Aztecs grew alongside the corn, with no gums and no preservatives. They took first place in H-E-B’s Quest for Texas Best in 2025. If you cook tacos at home and read ingredient decks, make the swap. If you want neutral white corn or a flour tortilla’s stretch, this is not that. Blue corn is earthier, and these land purple on the plate.
Slow North
Michelle Simmons · Soy candles and neck wraps
Michelle Simmons started Slow North in 2015 in the detached garage behind her Austin house, on maternity leave after her first son was born. The plan had been to private-label somebody else’s candles. She taught herself to pour after the samples came back throwing almost no scent. The line now runs to soy candles, bath soaks, sprays, and the lentil-filled neck wraps that go in the microwave or the freezer. There is a shop on North Lamar with a refill bar and candle-making workshops on the calendar. The scents are essential-oil only, mostly one or two notes, which is the point and also the catch. They are quiet. If you want a room to smell faintly of lavender and cedar, this is it. If you want one candle to scent a whole floor, buy something else.
The Burlap Bag
Founded by Josiah and Lauren Lowe; Lauren runs it · Hand-poured soy candles
They opened a shop in Austin in 2012 to sell other local makers’ work, and the candles they poured themselves outsold everything else on the shelves. So they closed the shop. Lauren Lowe runs the candle company now, with her kids helping, and it is online and wholesale only, so do not plan a visit. The candles are soy, hand-poured in Austin, in two sizes, and the names carry as much of the product as the wax does: Unicorn Puke, King of Farts, Someone in Texas Loves Me. They use fragrance oils, so they are loud and literal. Baked Bread smells like baked bread. This is a gift, a joke, a housewarming you want to be funny. It is not the candle for a quiet guest room.
Springland Pets
Shannon, Griffin, and Diana Ross · Dog travel water bottles
Springland runs out of South Congress, and it is a family operation in a fairly literal sense. Shannon Ross runs it, Griffin co-founded it, Diana is in the business too, and the product has a lineage. Their father founded a drinkware company in 1983 whose auto dog mug is the direct ancestor of what they sell now. The adult children spun it out as its own brand in 2021. It was called Springer until a trademark conflict pushed the rename. What they make is a water bottle with a bowl hinged into the lid. Squeeze it one-handed, the dog drinks, and whatever is left drains back into the bottle instead of onto the sidewalk. For a dog who hikes or rides along, it earns its space in the bag. For a dog who never leaves the yard, it does not.
Austin Baby Collection
Kelly Buller · Silicone kids’ bento boxes
Kelly Buller’s son was born five and a half weeks early, and the hunt for mealtime gear she trusted turned into a company. She built it at night and in the pump room at her marketing job, and quit only once she had the Target deal, which put the boxes in a thousand stores in August 2020. The product is a food-grade silicone bento box with five sealable compartments, plus a smaller three-compartment version, lunch bags, bibs, and placemats. It goes in the dishwasher, the microwave, and the freezer. The lid is built so a small kid can open it without an adult, which is the real argument for it. Read the name carefully though. This is lunch packing for toddlers and school-age kids, not a first-foods product.
Smartish
Matt Altschul · Phone cases and wallet cases
Matt Altschul’s first Austin company made accessories for Nintendo and Sony game gear, and the App Store took that market out from under him. Broke, sitting on a half-warehouse of product nobody wanted, he asked a friend to sew a card pocket onto an iPhone case, showed it around bars to see if anyone bit, and launched the Q Card Case in 2011. The company became Smartish in 2019, and as of a 2020 interview he held full control of it with a team of about fourteen. Slim cases, wallet cases that hold your cards, MagSafe wallets, and grips are the core, alongside a scatter of phone-adjacent extras. If you carry an iPhone and resent carrying a wallet, this is the obvious pick. If you carry a recent Galaxy, a Pixel, or anything that folds, the catalog thins out fast or has nothing for you.
Lost Pines Yaupon Tea
Jason Ellis, Heidi Wachter, and John Seibold · Wild-harvested yaupon tea
Three friends started this in Austin in 2015 around a plant most Texans treat as a nuisance shrub. Yaupon holly is one of the very few caffeinated plants native to North America, and they wild-harvest it from private land in the Lost Pines forest east of town, where thinning it back opens ground for native grasses. The Latin name, Ilex vomitoria, is a slander. Colonists watched Indigenous ceremonies that involved fasting and purging, and blamed the leaf. It comes as loose leaf and bags, light roast and dark, and it tastes toasted and grassy rather than like tea. There is almost no tannin in it, so it will not turn bitter if you forget the pot. If you want Earl Grey, this is not that.
Cuvée Coffee
Mike and Rashelle McKim · Direct-trade coffee and nitro cold brew
Mike and Rashelle McKim have been roasting in Austin since 1998, buying direct from farms well before that became a marketing line. Cuvée put nitro cold brew in a widget can in 2014, and a year later the company landed in a public fight with the state liquor board over filling cans of draft beer at its coffee bar. The state seized the machine and held it for a year and a half. The McKims won, the machine came back, and the case became the impetus for new legislation. What you can actually buy is whole-bean coffee, single origins and blends, and the nitro cans, which pour like draft. The East Sixth bar closed in 2024; the rooms now are hotel lobbies, and the newest one opened on South Lamar this month.
Kerbey Lane Cafe
Patricia and David Ayer; their son Mason runs it · Pancake mixes
Patricia and David Ayer opened Kerbey Lane in a bungalow on the street it is named for in 1980, and their son Mason, born just after the doors opened, left a law career in 2010 to come run it. The family still owns the whole thing. The pancakes are why anybody knows the name, and the mixes are what you can take home: buttermilk, gingerbread, and a gluten-free gingerbread. Gingerbread is the one worth pointing at, because a gingerbread pancake mix is genuinely hard to find in a grocery aisle and buttermilk is not. This is for the person who moved away and misses one specific Sunday. It is not for a scratch baker, and a bag of mix will not hand you the queso or the room.
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